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A strange sort of Friday...
Feb. 28th, 2014 10:51 pmPerhaps the day seemed strange because of the nature of the document I was working on, I don't know. It was one of those strange documents with a lot of numbers formatted wholly inconsistently: mixed usage of commas and periods as decimal delimiters, mixed usage of spaces and no spaces as delimiters for thousands and millions, mixed centered and left-justified positioning.
In short, most of the tables looked as if they'd been worked on by at least a half dozen people with their own private ideas of how numbers should appear in a document. The document also exhibited rather strange notions with regard to paragraph numbering and line-item numbering in tables.
This leads me to believe that one of the most valuable (if inadvertent) episodes of "cross training" that ultimately helped me break out into writing articles for computer magazines and eventually become a successful translator was my years as a production editor at Plenum, learning the ropes of what it takes to take a run-of-the-mill manuscript, fresh from a translator's typewriter, and polish it into a published product. The practical application of that process resulted in my being able to deliver products with quite a bit of that polish already applied and buffed to a lovely shine before it hit an editor's inbox.
I suspect there is a parallel here to public speaking, where it is said the greatest impact results from factors other than the actual message being communicated (i.e., appearance, voice quality, body language, eye contact, and so on are more important than what's being said). If the analogy holds, it may well be that, given two manuscripts of roughly equal quality—whatever that slippery term might mean in this context, even if we attempt to restrict its applicability to "the message being communicated"—the one that causes the editor less of a headache (because terms are consistent, grammar and spelling are not issues, etc.) will appear more attractive, and its originator will, therefore, be more successful over time.
Cheers...
In short, most of the tables looked as if they'd been worked on by at least a half dozen people with their own private ideas of how numbers should appear in a document. The document also exhibited rather strange notions with regard to paragraph numbering and line-item numbering in tables.
This leads me to believe that one of the most valuable (if inadvertent) episodes of "cross training" that ultimately helped me break out into writing articles for computer magazines and eventually become a successful translator was my years as a production editor at Plenum, learning the ropes of what it takes to take a run-of-the-mill manuscript, fresh from a translator's typewriter, and polish it into a published product. The practical application of that process resulted in my being able to deliver products with quite a bit of that polish already applied and buffed to a lovely shine before it hit an editor's inbox.
I suspect there is a parallel here to public speaking, where it is said the greatest impact results from factors other than the actual message being communicated (i.e., appearance, voice quality, body language, eye contact, and so on are more important than what's being said). If the analogy holds, it may well be that, given two manuscripts of roughly equal quality—whatever that slippery term might mean in this context, even if we attempt to restrict its applicability to "the message being communicated"—the one that causes the editor less of a headache (because terms are consistent, grammar and spelling are not issues, etc.) will appear more attractive, and its originator will, therefore, be more successful over time.
Cheers...
